Thursday, 4 December 2014

Workshop with India - Screenprint

Our workshop was India was about Screenprinting. I have never screenprinted before so this was totally new for me to try. We firstly picked out a design painted with acrylic on acetate to use and prepared a silk screen for printing. The Silk screen was prepared by dragging emulsion paint over one side and leaving it to dry for awhile. When dry, the acetate piece was placed onto a UV lamp machine with the dried silk screen on top. The UV lamp is turned on for 50 seconds to soften the paint around the design. The screen is then washed down with a hose and water, which then leaves behind just the design on the screen. When printed, the paint will act as a stencil to create the final piece.

The paints used were an acrylic blue and red, mixed with a solution to keep the acrylics from drying quicker than on it's own. This also makes printing much easier.  


The printing progress :

- Make sure printing machine is clean and tape down a sheet of tracing paper like material.


- Put tape along the edges of the silk screen to make sure paint will not bleed unnecessarily over the edges.  Secure silk screen to clamped frame on the printing machine.

-  Apply the paint to the top part of the silk screen and use the squeegee at a 45 degree angle and pull down to make the first print. Printing on the tracing paper like material gives you a starting point for the final print and to make sure the screen will create a clean print.

- Line up a sheet of paper under the screen, using tape to create a guild line for the paper and print again.

- When dry and if applying a second colour, use the tracing paper print to line up the paper underneath, to make sure the final print will line up with the first set of colour(s). Turn on the machines vacuum so that the paper will stay in place, Peel back the tracing paper and press the silk screen down and print.

Our final outcome was really clean and crisp and easy to do. The chosen colours worked well too as the blue was placed ontop of the red, which when overlapped created a dark blue tone for extra depth. I really enjoyed screenprinting and really want to try and create a design from scratch in the future. 

No comments:

Post a Comment